Family scatters local columnist's ashes in Pacific

Long before she died, she decided she would be cremated, and her ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

Sunday, a little more than two months after her death in her 80s, her family boarded a boat and carried out her wishes.

"She loved the water; she loved to swim," said her daughter, Helen Weiss. "She felt this was a peaceful place."

Although Renee Weiss lived in California for the past 11 years, from 1957 to 1997, she and her late husband, Egon, who died in 2003, lived in Cornwall. Egon was for many years director of the U.S. Military Academy Library.

According to Helen Weiss, her father was dedicated to preserving the past, while her mother was more of a futurist.

Renee Weiss was barely out of high school when she fled Vienna in the late 1930s, as Hitler's forces were moving into Austria. She met Egon, a fellow Austrian immigrant, at an international center in Boston. They married in 1942, and both served their adopted country in World War II, Egon in Europe in military intelligence and Renee as a Navy physiotherapy technician in Maryland and Virginia.

After settling in Cornwall, Renee began a women's health club at the Newburgh YMCA in 1962, offering clients medical massages, water aerobics and yoga.

"At that time, that wasn't a commonplace thing," her daughter said. "She was kind of ahead of her time."

Renee Weiss used her love of science fact and science fiction in a column called Alternate Futures, which she wrote for the Cornwall Local for several years in the early 1980s.

She spun columns off current topical events and issues like the first space shuttle flights — she thought they might one day help colonize space — and the need for the human race to put aside differences and find common ground to survive in an age of nuclear weapons and so-called "Star Wars" defense systems.

In March 1982, more than a decade before the international space station was built, she wrote: "What a chance we have to take the first step to bury the hatchet with the Russians and combine our knowledge and skills and explore space together as human beings who are trying to prepare a better world for generations to come."